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Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Workers at Chinese electronics giant Foxconn, angry over the shuttering of an Xbox 360 production line in the Chinese city of Wuhan, climbed to the roof of a six story dormitory and threatened to jump en masse if their conditions weren't met.

The several dozen workers threatened mass suicide after Foxconn announced layoffs and transfers of workers and purportedly reneged on severance pay.

In a statement, Foxconn said that it did not change course on severance pay but that it was only offered to select workers.

The workers climbed to the top of the six-story dormitory on 3 January and threatened to jump before Wuhan city officials persuaded them to desist and return to work, according to the workers and accounts online. The workers gave varying estimates of the numbers involved in the strike, from 80 to 200, and photos posted online showed dozens of people crowding the roof of the boxy concrete building.

"Actually none of them were going to jump. They were there for the compensation. But the government and the company officials were just as afraid, because if even one of them jumped, the consequences would be hard to imagine," said Wang Jungang, an equipment engineer in the Xbox production line, who left the plant earlier this month.

I suppose in a country where worker strikes can be met with mass arrests, the threat of mass suicide is a more palpable one. Foxconn has gotten plenty of bad press over its Apple operations - a mass suicide would be really bad PR for the company.

Then again, this is some pretty high stakes negotiating on the part of the workers. Suicide sort of closes the book on any future ... everything.

The labor situation in China is certainly far from perfect. In a closed society with no hint of real democracy, no real free commerce, a highly intrusive managerial state, and so forth, it's unsurprising that workers are treated poorly.

I do think it's in the long-term interest of US firms to do all that they can to ensure the fair and equitable treatment of workers overseas, however. The attention being paid to Foxconn and its Western clients is a good thing - not just for the workers involved but for the future of peaceful commerce between nations.

Someday these workers in China will be consumers of lots and lots of US goods. US firms need to remember that. Right now Chinese people assemble iPads that Americans buy, but maybe someday Chinese people will be buying those iPads themselves.

The notion that management should be against labor or that market advocates should be inherently anti-labor is just wrong-headed. In the long term the goal should be to no longer need organized labor to ensure workers' rights because individual rights and autonomy are protected. The problems at Foxconn and elsewhere in the developing world underscore how far globalism has to travel before achieving its goals.